Records are meant to be broken, but it's Corsair who keeps doing all the breaking. Once again, the company's auspiciously named Dominator series has taken memory frequencies to new heights, surpassing its own world record for the highest achieved DDR3 frequency set just over two months ago.

On May 20, Corsair's Dominator danced at 2462MHz, a record that went untouched until now. This time around, Corsair managed to push ahead to 2580MHz and did so with respectable latencies set at 9-9-9-24. It took an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 overclocked to a 645MHz frontside bus to get there, as well as cooling the motherboard, CPU, chipset, and memory to a very chilly -20 degrees Celsius. Brrr!

Because of the extreme cooling involved and obvious risk of component failures, kids probably shouldn't try this at home, but if you're a memory manufacturer not named Corsair, feel free to give it a shot.

3D graphics technology has grown by leaps and bounds since 3DFX first laid its Voodoo on the computing world, and today's videocards boast everything from multiple GPUs in a single package to the promise of physics processing. And not just for gaming, fanatical Folders can crunch through more proteins by utilizing their GPU, or decode a high definition movie on their new big screen TV.

Leading the charge into this new era of 3D computing are Nvidia and ATI, two companies who have recently started going at each others' throats with aggressive price cuts and a deluge of new videocards while simultaneously chasing the performance crown. But for all their battles, both old and new, it's Intel, CPU maker extraordinaire, who continues to lead the market.

Find out how much catching up Nvidia and ATI have to do after the jump.

While other parts of the economy are definitely feeling the slowdown from the energy pinch, Intel remains upbeat and expects no slowdown in global demand for personal computers.

Eweek quotes Intel Chairman, Craig Barrett, "We gave a relatively upbeat business forecast, saying that despite the economic problems in the United States our business is so international that we didn't see any slowdown in the PC market."

He also seemed to brush off the European Union’s recent antitrust charges saying that price reductions for microprocessors and computers have an "anti-inflationary nature". While prices are rising globally, prices for computers and processors have dropped which he calls a testimony to high competition in the sector.

On the high end of desktop processors where Intel currently dominates, it is more like a boxer keeping his opponent on the ropes. AMD currently doesn’t have anything to compete directly with Intel’s high end and Intel would like to keep it that way by slashing its prices and keeping AMD safely behind. Good for consumers right now, but without serious competition those prices will go up someday and there may be less reason for rapid innovation.

Barrett went on to say "It looks as the market is functioning as it should, because every year consumers are getting more for less. We continue to say that, please just look at the facts, don't just listen to a competitor complaint."

Last year the European Commission accused Intel of giving computer makers rebates to limit their use of rival AMD's chips or avoid them altogether. They issued additional charges against Intel earlier this month, saying Intel had paid a retailer off to avoid offering computers with chips made by AMD.

It certainly sounds like Intel will use any tool it can lay its hands on to stay ahead of AMD, and when you’re the size of Intel, what is a little economic downturn?

Microsoft, which is more often on the receiving side of patent infringement claims, now finds itself on the other side of the legal fence and is taking Primax Electronics to task.

Microsoft is upset over several patents on two different technologies used in computer mice. The first is U2, which allows a mouse to connect to both USB and PS/2 ports and then auto detects the port that is being used. The other, TiltWheel, adds additional cursor movement abilities via mouse tipping (not related to cow tipping).

CNet quotes Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez as saying that they filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission against Primax Electronics only after "repeated attempts to engage in meaningful license terms over the past two years."

Microsoft is known to have an open policy with licensing its intellectual property. They license for years at a time and have more than 20 companies that are part of its hardware technology licensing program.

Microsoft does not sound like it is landing in the realm of Patent Troll here; they actually make the products and have other companies licensing the patents. What do you think? Is Microsoft being a Patent Troll or is it just guarding its intellectual property? Sound off below!

We just got our hands on some gritty new screenshots from the next Wolfenstein game, which is being shown at this year's QuakeCon. Published by Activision and developed by Raven Software, Wolfenstein once again sends soldier BJ Blazkowicz to fight Nazis and supernatural demons in an alternate World War II. The screens show Nazi troops assembled in the dark, resistance fighters huddled in demolished buildings, and most interestingly, new map locations that have been transformed with a supernatural green tint of destruction. We don't know how these environmental shifts will occur, or how it ties with the story, but it sure looks cool!

If Apple has a giant target on its back, it's Dell that keeps taking aim. Earlier this week Dell launched its Studio Hybrid desktop, a hip looking miniature sized PC that will do battle with Apple's Mac Mini, and now the company wants to wage a war in the portable music player market too.

According to the Wall Street Journal, several Dell officials have indicated the OEM has been testing a digital music player for the past several months and that it could see the light of day by September, the same time millions of kids will be seen lugging their iPods back to school as dozens of those less fortunate look on in envy with their Zunes. But it's not exactly unchartered territory for Dell, who half a decade ago launched its Dell DJ line, a now defunct music player that never even had a chance to take on the iPod. Now Dell will get that chance.

Dell's new music player will purportedly feature a small navigation screen with basic button scrolls, and will sport a WiFi connection for linking up with online music services. Most surprisingly, the new player is said to be priced at less than $100.

Does Dell have a shot at slicing into Apple's market share with a budget MP3 player, or will it ultimately join the DJ in the gadget graveyard?

The Mashable social networking blog reports that the creators of the now-offline Scrabble clone Scrabulous, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, have now launched Wordscraper. Wordscraper, like its now-vanished sibling, is for Facebook users only.

Wordscraper doesn't look like Scrabble, as it uses circles instead of squares for letter placement. Although Wordscraper uses multiple letter and word scores like Scrabble, it implements them with different-colored circles, and the default board uses a much different layout than Scrabble.

To learn more about what makes Wordscraper different, and maybe better, than its predecessor, join us after the jump.

Intel can not only lay claim as the current king of chip technology, but its upcoming Nehalem microarchitecture looks poised to keep the silicon studs on top of the competition well into 2009. AMD has yet to threaten Intel's position ever since Conroe, and while the company remains confident under Dirk Meyer as the new head honcho, it's still playing catch up to Intel's 45nm technology.

The situation gets a little more competitive when switching from CPUs to GPUs, and according to Tomshardware, sources at both ATI and Nvidia are saying they will each have a 40nm GPU manufacturing process by the first half of 2009, possibly to be unveiled at next year's CeBit.

Assuming either company meets their target, the accomplishment will unseat Intel as the technological leader in terms of the smallest chip structures, even if only for a short time. The road won't stop at Nehalem and Intel is already busy developing 32nm CPUs, which many expect to be shown off in prototype form at the company's spring development forum in H1 2009. Volume shipments could come as early as Q3 next year.

Even so, if 40nm GPUs materialize as reported, it will mark the first time GPUs will overtake CPUS in terms of production nodes. That won't necessarily make it a better chip, but you can expect plenty of fanfare should Nvidia and/or ATI dethrone the silicon king.

Here's some shocking news just breaking from the Quakecon Keynote: Rage and Doom 4 will not be sold online via digital distribution. Rage, being published by EA, would be an obvious choice for EA's Downloader service, but apparently that won't be the case. The only way to buy the two games whenever they come out is in stores with boxed copies.

Additionally, Rage will most likely ship on multiple game discs for the Xbox 360. The DVD-only format for the Xbox 360 is its biggest limiting factor, since the Xbox 360-formatted discs actually hold 1GB less than standard 4.7GB DVDs (multiplied by two when dual-layered). And since the royalty charge per disc is actually surprisingly high, id hopes that Microsoft will make a concession for Rage, or else the company may actually have to sacrifice texture and asset quality to get the game to fit on fewer than THREE discs. The cost of the 3rd DVD alone would cost millions of dollars with the current royalty rate, says John Carmack.

When comparing the Xbox 360 to the PS3, the more spacious Blu-ray format is the only thing Carmack likes more about Sony's console. Everything else is better on the 360, he says.

John Carmack gave QuakeCon attendees a glimpse into his thoughts about the next-generation of gaming graphics. id Tech 6, for example, probably won't be coded in Java or any protected language. It also will be designed for hardware that doesn't excist right now. With new discrete graphics players entering the field (Larrabee, Fusion, etc), Carmack knows that the PC space is relavent, and that's where he'll be looking when thinking about coding his next engine.

When considering console technology and the next-generation of consoles (whether it's PS4 or Xbox 720), Carmack actually hopes that the console generation will last twice as long as the previous ones -- though he doesn't think it'll be a reality, as console makers will want to one-up competitors with early releases. Doom 4 will come out for this generation of hardware, but anything after that is up in the air. But one thing he's certain of: the practical approach for people who want to code games that look like today's games but better will be polygon-based.

With CUDA and General Purpose Computing, Carmack says he thinks it's interesting, but he's still waiting to see if there will be other real-application standards to drive graphics. There's no solid background for these new technologies like there was with OpenGL and Direct3D. He sees these technologies as toy research products, and not real applications. It's just like the mid 90s, when graphics were in a period of flux. Billions of dollars are being spent to make bets on the next big thing, but he's worried about years being wasted on speculative architectures.